Without guns
by BlackEyedGirl
Summary: Five ways the problem was resolved without guns. Team gen with some slight het and slash implications


**Title:** Five ways the problem was resolved without guns  
**Fandom:** Torchwood  
**Characters:** Team. Het and slash implications  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Genre:** Fluff/humour  
**Length:** 2,500 words  
**Disclaimer:** All belongs to RTD and the BBC.  
**Spoilers:** Up to end of S1  
**Summary:** As the title says! Team gen-ishness, though implications abound as in the show.

* * *

**1**

"They did _what?" _Gwen asked. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Tosh, it doesn't matter. Give me your jacket."

"I'm sorry?"

"Jacket, Tosh!"

Toshiko handed over her plain black jacket mutely, looking at it as if she suspected it might have hitherto unrealised powers.

Gwen had dived into her handbag, and thrust something into her pocket with menace before reapplying her lipstick. Banging the car door open with one hand, and loosening a top button with the other, she caught Tosh's look of confusion.

This wouldn't be enough though, and it was the last demand she felt guilty about. Gwen snatched the hat from the head of one of the police officers standing around near the unruly bar. She flashed an ID and placed a finger to her lips with a warning smile. The young officer was still frowning, but he nodded reluctantly.

Another ID check got her into the backroom with 'management'. And allowed her to find the three other men who blinked at her in confusion (and some flushed cheeks – for more than the obvious reason that they were _morons_). The one standing at the front, not letting the three leave, was introduced to her as the boss. He was the one whose eyes had gone most immediately to the loosed buttons of her shirt - this was going to be easier than she had thought.

"I'm sorry, sir, if my trainees caused you any trouble," she said, smiling brightly and apologetically.

His gaze moved to her lips for a moment, then managed to come up to meet her eyes. "Your trainees, miss? Ma'am?"

The badge was in front of him and away before he could possibly have read it. "Undercover training. Not that they were very successful, I'm afraid. You seem to have spotted them a mile away." She dropped her eyes quickly, as if impressed.

"Well, your lads did stick out a bit." He puffed out his chest.

"I keep telling them," Gwen said, looking pointedly at Jack, "but they're slow learners." Owen, who had been smirking too much for her comfort, got a sharp slap on the back of the head. "Need it drilled into them."

The boss laughed, sharing the joke.

She laughed back, and then got down to business. "Tempted as I am to leave them here... I hope we can resolve this without any more trouble?" Gwen tried another sweet smile.

"They did..." he began to protest vaguely.

She reached into her pocket casually and twirled the handcuffs off her thumb, biting down on one scarlet lip. God, she was never going to live this down. Even Ianto's eyes had glazed over a little now.

It had the desired effect though. "Tell you what, officer, why don't you just go on and do what you need to? There wasn't much damage."

"That's very kind of you." She smiled.

"You'll be back, yeah?" he asked, as she was gesturing the men to leave. "On... training exercises?"

"I'm sure we will," Gwen forced out, with another smile. Jack was laughing, the bastard, she could tell by the way his back shook. When she grabbed his ear, the laugh caught in his throat with a startled yelp.

Worriedly, though, that seemed to further arouse the confused club-owner. She kept her nails digging into Jack's ear, and pushed Owen out the door, where he clattered into Ianto. Three bloody stooges. At least they had all shut up now.

Finally, finally, she got all three of them to the SUV, throwing the hat back to its owner on the way. Tosh took one look at the four of them and snapped her mouth closed.

Gwen threw her door open with a crash. "Next time, Tosh, next time, _you_ can be the stripper-cop."

"Gwen, I..."

"Don't. Just don't."

"Somehow, I don't think Tosh would have pulled that one off," Owen said, grinning. "No offence, sweetheart."

"Owen, if you don't think I'll use the handcuffs in the way they're intended..."

"You'll what, wave them at me and flutter your eyelashes?" he said, "Or maybe- Ow!"

Jack picked up the cuffs from where they had bounced off Owen's skull. "I'm not exactly sure that was using them as intended."

"If you don't shut up I'm going to use this bloody gun as intended, Jack, and then..."

"Okay, okay," he replied placatingly. Then, after a beat: "So was that twirling thing something they teach you at Police Academy?"

- - -

**2**

Donhg-tun tribe member from Sest, according to Jack. Holding them in a very crude hostage situation – Gwen in the centre with a claw to her neck, and the cumulative weaponry of the team in a pile by their feet to keep that claw from getting any closer. He was backing away, turning around and exposing his back – first mistake – in an attempt to get Gwen out of the door – second mistake.

Jack probably would have got to his gun anyway. But Owen's underarm throw was quicker, and the liquid exploded over the would-be hostage-taker with a satisfying fizz. He yelled and convulsed, giving Gwen an opportunity to free herself. She threw herself to the ground before four guns could be retrieved and aimed over her head.

Four bangs later, and they had another corpse in the middle of the offices.

"Clear?" Jack called.

They got up slowly, making sure their corpse was actually dead, and not about to leap back up and take offence at a chest full of bullets.

"Owen?" Gwen asked, her voice still tense. "What did you do?"

"Stuff from earlier."

"Sorry?"

"The stuff from earlier that we couldn't work out? That Myfanwy wouldn't touch."

"The stuff you told me was non-toxic?"

"Non-toxic to humans, I said. Not lizard-men."

"And you knew that, did you? You were sure?"

"I was pretty sure."

"You were _pretty_ sure? I'm not sure how comfortable I am relying on your '_pretty_ sure', Owen."

"Hey!" he objected, pointing at his chest. "Doctorate. Medical researcher. And also, it was Tosh's idea."

"Excuse me?" Tosh asked, looking up from the body in surprise.

"Credit where credit's due," Owen said, shrugging. "You're the one who did the analysis in the first place. Spectroscopy and all that."

Gwen smiled over at the other women, and then walked over to give her a quick hug. "Thanks, Tosh."

"You're welcome…" she answered hesitantly.

Owen sighed, and banged the remaining samples together with a gratifying clatter. "Bloody typical."

- - -

**3**

She was whispering in Ianto's ear. Ianto was not pulling away, politely or less so, in the way Jack would like him to.

"You can't just run off with my employees!" Jack objected, trying to get between the two of them.

Ianto turned to her and gave her an honest-to-God long-suffering sigh.

She smiled, or Jack thought she did, and turned back to Ianto without a second thought. "We would treat you well. Much better than this." Laying a hand on his arm was going to be the next step – Jack could just _tell._

Before she got that far, Ianto stepped back, shaking his head regretfully. "That's very kind. But I'm afraid I can't."

Now she did touch him, wrapping one arm around his waist and tugging, gently, towards the ship. Leant her head down to whisper in his ear again.

Ianto laughed, low and intimate, and shook his head again. "I'm sorry." He gestured outwards at Jack. "He can't work the coffee-maker. And his methods of removing blood stains tend to turn everything yellow."

Jack peered at the cuff of his shirt to verify that.

She shrugged sadly, and disentangled her arm from Ianto's. "He needs you here?"

"I think so, yes," Ianto agreed.

"Then I could not possibly…"

Jack made a grab for Ianto's sleeve, but she turned them away deftly, and continued to talk to Ianto.

Ianto said something else, and she patted his cheek. Motherly, Jack might call it; now that it seemed more certain that she wasn't actually going to abduct one of his team.

When she had patted him again, told him that he was beautiful, and _finally_ left in the ship, Jack grabbed Ianto's arm again. "You realise she was trying to kidnap you?"

"Yes, sir. If by 'kidnap' you mean offer me a job with better wages, better benefits, and a considerably reduced chance of violent death."

Jack paused for a minute. "We have benefits!"

"The promise of taking care of funeral costs doesn't mean a lot when it amounts to archival in the morgue, sir. Our medical care is Owen swearing about the manifest stupidity in not ducking to avoid being hit with alien acid. Vacation pay would be impressive if we weren't on call every day. And as for severance packages…"

"Ianto."

"Retcon and a nice whiskey does not qualify as 'recompense for dedicated service, commensurate with length of employment'."

"Ianto!"

"I'm sorry," he conceded. "We do have excellent dental."

- - -

**4**

"Have you been watching 'Die Hard' on the sly, Tosh?" Owen asked. He shook his head to get the soot out of his hair.

Ianto muttered something under his breath, but as their medic wasn't the only one trailing black footprints down to the showers, he didn't take any further issue.

"Die Hard?" Tosh asked curiously.

Owen made a flicking motion with his thumb. "Saving the day with no more than a Zippo lighter," he explained.

"Um. No."

"Gardener's World?"

"Oh. Um. 'Harry Potter' actually."

"Excuse me?"

Jack breezed past, half-undressed already and working his way to the whole way there. "Devil's Snare. Likes the dark and damp, so light a fire? And you don't get much darker or damper than our vaults." He laughed at a joke he decided not to tell them, and didn't notice that he had stopped the conversation.

The only sound was the rushing water of Jack's shower.

"Jack?" Gwen asked.

"Yeah?"

"How do you know that?"

"Know what?"

"'Harry Potter'?"

"I read!"

"You read '_Harry Potter'_?"

"I have a lot of time on my hands."

"So in between saving the universe from the threat of alien attack, you read kids books?" Owen asked. "I mean, we expect this kind of thing from Tosh… _Don't _try and take offence at that, Toshiko, you admitted it outright."

She glared at him, before making her way into the shower. "I've never thought that _reading_ was something a person had to _admit_ to."

Jack laid a soapy hand warmly on her shoulder, leaning over the divide. He used the other to flick bubbles at Owen's face. "And a good thing too. Or we would all be Miracle-Gro right about now."

"I wasn't complaining," Owen protested, sputtering around the soap dripping into his mouth. "I'm as glad not to be plant-food as the next man."

Ianto, the next man in question, was looking pensive. "Flame throwers," he said, in a decisive non sequitur.

"Ianto," Jack asked.

"You're the one that made the observation, sir. Our lower levels _are_ ideally suited for the…"

"…Devil's Snare?"

"If you must. I don't think that will have been the only one."

"Hence flamethrowers."

"Exactly."

Jack grinned. "For you, Ianto, I'm sure we can rustle something up. Get working on a name."

- - -

5

"What can I do for you ladies?"

"He damaged our ship!" 'He' being Ianto, which was a rare enough occasion without adding Tosh having managed to compound the problem with an inadvertent breach of etiquette. He couldn't blame her – it was hard to tell where to shake hands with a Pykorat.

"And now that we've got it working again…"

"We were insulted!"

Jack sighed. "A misunderstanding. How can I make it up to you? We have some excellent alcohol around here somewhere. At least, it better be around here somewhere… I'm not actually allowed to pay you to leave, but we can get around that... No? I can sing, I can dance, I'm an excellent kiss-"

They interrupted him. "The first."

"The alcohol? I'm not sure your systems would be able to synthesise…"

"No. The song."

"Oh for… it's been a really long time, ladies. The illegal payment was a much better offer."

"What would we do with your money?"

"Buy some paint for that scratch on your ship?"

"We have chosen."

Up on the gallery, the others were snickering. Jack turned around to glare threateningly at Ianto and Tosh, who he was abruptly feeling less sympathy for. He sighed. "Any requests?"

He went with Cole Porter. Everyone loved Cole Porter. At least, he had known people who had liked this one. A couple, anyway.

It was enough for the Pykorat, anyway, who left in a much friendlier disposition than they had arrived. (How Ianto had managed to wing their ship with the Hub's communication equipment was still a mystery. Possibly one that spoke to 'tinkering' on Tosh's part…). They smiled widely at him and promised to return soon. Even when he did his job right, something still ended up going wrong... But he smiled back anyway, and took the correct appendage to wish them a safe journey home.

The others were still grinning at him. But as he walked over to explain why, exactly, you should wait for the other person to stick out the proper hand, and why the hailing program was not a toy, Gwen frowned.

"Are you alright, Jack?"

"Other than discovering that you really can put a price on dignity, I'm fine."

She was still wearing her concerned face. Her 'I'm listening' face. "It's just that it was a very sad song. For you to choose."

"It was the only one I could remember all the words to," he lied.

Owen came to his rescue, probably unintentionally. "It's from a musical, they're all doom and gloom and hearts breaking and people flinging themselves off things. Amazing anyone ever makes it to the curtain-call."

"I didn't know it was from a musical," Gwen said.

"Me neither," Tosh confessed.

It was Owen's turn to be scrutinised. He held his hands up in protest. "I dated a girl who was obsessed with musicals. Path of least resistance. Or the quickest route to bed, anyway."

Jack kept looking at him. "So you know a musical from the 1930s."

"I just explained!"

He took out his wallet. "I'll give you fifty bucks if you can tell me the end of this line. _Marry me a little_…?"

Owen looked at the ground, and seemed to be having an internal debate. Eventually: "…_Love me just enough_." And a hand held out.

Jack held the wallet above his head for a moment, grinning as Owen restrained himself from reaching up, like a schoolboy. "I didn't know 'Company' had even played in the West End this decade…" He pulled the notes out, still above his head, and then lowered them down within Owen's reach.

"Jack…" Owen said, reluctantly, looking at the notes in his hand.

"I'm paying extra for the blush."

* * *

FIN 


End file.
